Tropical Hits And Misses With Two New Offerings

It's hard to imagine two plays more different from each other than Bog Talk and Idle Anger, the two one-act plays sharing a bill this week and next at Tropical's Free Theatre.

Idle Anger, by Deborah A. Gibboney, is mostly realistic; Bog Talk, by Bobbie Bell, is not. Bog Talk is filled with humor; Idle Anger, as one may guess from the title, is not. That one of the plays works and the other doesn't is hardly surprising, considering the Tropical's history of giving untried plays by local playwrights a chance.

In Bog Talk, characters look and speak realistically, but they behave as no normal person ever would. The action takes place in the office of a man named Davenant, who sits at an empty, antiseptic-looking white desk and stares into space. ''What to do, what to do,'' he wonders aloud. Problems arise when he calls in a subordinate, Lawrence, and asks for a pencil. Lawrence ponders the morality of good pencils and bad pencils, accuses Davenant of being monosyllabic and dull, and then, with another subordinate named Carmen, brings Davenant a cowbell, a violin, a broomstick -- anything but what Davenant wants.

What we have here is a failure to communicate, one that Davenant believes is willful but, to Lawrence and Carmen, seems anything but. And what we have here are three characters comically stuck in their own versions of reality. Julie Yvette Pelaez has directed the short play in a streamlined fashion, and Ken Knose, as Davenant, is a riot -- deadpan, dry, with a left eyebrow that continually, sorrowfully, reaches for the sky.

While Bog Talk floats in no particular time or place, Idle Anger is rooted in two places -- New York and Florida -- and, more generally, in reality. The play centers on a young woman named Karen, an artist who is engaged to a man named Michael. Karen is still stewing over the suicide of her best friend in college six years before, and finally, after she and Michael argue about it, she returns to Florida to face her angry memories of her friend.

Idle Anger is filled with sincere, anguished feelings, and yet those feelings are not likely to come across to an audience as the playwright intends. What we see of Karen's relationship with her friend Donna is superficial, given to discussions about parties and dates -- ''All I ever wanted was a boyfriend with a lavaliere,'' Karen remembers. She says that the friendship was a close and deep one, and yet the playwright never shows us any of that depth. So it's impossible to understand why she has let her anger simmer all these years.

The play is not helped by writing that should sound more conversational, nor by the often stilted style in which actress Kate Singleton, as Karen, delivers her frequent monologues. There's a lot of pain in Idle Anger, but playwright Gibboney chooses to reveal it in ways that are rarely new, rarely involving. It's an approach, unfortunately, that leaves an audience out.